THE Affair star Dominic West

admits he has fallen under the spell of W. H. Auden’s erotic poetry.

‘He worked in a library which I do think are the sexiest places in the world,’ the Old Etonian actor tells Mariella Frostrup in a BBC podcast. ‘I think because it’s transgressive, because you’re supposed to be quiet.

Maybe because it was my student days, when I spent most of my time in a library, and I suppose I found my eyes wandering most of the time off these sacred texts on to whoever was in there.’ Somehow the actor maintained sufficient concentration to leave Trinity College Dublin with an English degree.